It’s a bright, sunny morning after a gig, and Chrissie Hynde is doing what any good rock star would: hanging out in her hotel room, casually flipping the pages of a magazine and eyeballing porn.
Not the kind about sex — the kind about luxury goods.
“I opened this thing while I was waiting,” Hynde, 57, says, referring to the high-fashion magazine on the breakfast table where she’s seated in West Hollywood.
” ‘Why crave crocodile when you can clutch alligator?’ By Chanel, no less — $39,450 so you can clutch alligator! What (moron) would even entertain such a thing?
“Sorry. Does no one have any shame anymore?”
Moral outrage surfaces often in any conversation with the firebrand frontwoman of the Pretenders. For three decades she’s been the quintessential female rocker, but she’s been a strict vegetarian and ardent animal-rights advocate even longer.
She’s angry about mistreatment of animals, the economy and the paving over of small- town America. That last subject inspired the title of the Pretenders’ first album in six years, “Break Up the Concrete.”
“We like to travel on trains,” she says. “That’s part of the whole drive: Reinstate public transportation, especially trains. Get out of the cars. Destroy all the streets and roads and bridges and dams.
“Obviously,” she adds, “that’s the best-case scenario. That’s not going to happen. But think small. . . . Do the things you can do.
“Stop paying the slaughter man. Stop paying the factory farmers. Stop supporting the corporations that are destroying everything. Make your life more simple.”
She and her bandmates also have simplified musically on the new album, which sounds intensely raw and stripped- down. The 11 songs were recorded in Los Angeles over a relatively brief 12 days, with the band producing. The songs seem to sprout organically from American roots music: elemental rock, R&B, soul and a bit of country twang from steel guitarist Eric Heywood.
“That’s really kind of what the record’s all about, I suppose: simplicity. Getting away from all the razzmatazz, the excess,” she says.
Part of the excess she’s avoiding is record promotion, though she did consent to appear last week on the “Today” show. “I told my record company I don’t want to be on television, I don’t want to do press.”
She pauses, looks at the reporter sitting across from her and shrugs. “Of course, because I like the album and I’m the guy that has to do it, I’ll do what I have to do.”
Hynde has been more than game to help out with the various facets of viral marketing that the company is using to get the word out, according to Jeff Ayeroff, the veteran record exec who partners with millionaire Steve Bing in the fledgling Shangri-La Music label that signed the Pretenders.
“When we drew up our wish list of artists we’d want to have on the label, they were in the top five,” Ayeroff said. “We’re very proud of the record they’ve given us — there’s no making excuses. It’s a real record that sounds great; the songs have great content.”
